In simple terms, I’m writing this because I have to. My whole life, I’ve only been able to organize and cope with emotion by writing it down and sharing it with someone. I am not able to share any of this with the people I know in real life, because to do so would be to co-opt something that is not mine to co-opt. So here’s my story for today, which is a story of failure, and other than a few elided or altered details it is as true as I can remember it. It is sad and I suspect multiple trigger warnings apply. Please proceed, or not, accordingly.
Around fifteen years ago my wife and I were hired to musically direct and direct, respectively, a community theater production of a relatively famous and very dumb musical. We were 28 and brand new parents at the time. Because it was a musical that featured a large chorus of children, the auditions were a pretty rough parade of stage moms and out-of-tune squawking. Midway through, a 15-year-old girl who I will call Anna auditioned; I remember without checking that she sang a song called “Not for the Life of Me” from the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. She was an order of magnitude more talented and more poised than any other person, adult or child, who auditioned. We gave her a small but featured role – the only one suitable for her age – and she performed it, and that was it. For a while.
A year later I was in a different show with Anna. During one of the performances, I went into the theatre kitchen to get a soda, and when I opened the refrigerator, I found Anna, curled up inside. No one else was in the kitchen; no one knew she was in there. She played it off as a joke – “ha ha, scared you!” – but I remember making eye contact for a second and thinking, she was hoping no one would ever find her. I told the story a few times to a few people, and none of them shared my concern. I remember thinking, yeah, but you didn’t see the look on her face… but I am often wrong, and anyway it was none of my business.
Time passed. Anna became an adult, and not an easy one to deal with. She was prickly, smart enough to know how to hurt someone’s feelings and mean enough to do it. She was not always reliable as an actor. But her talent was unsurpassed, and so we kept casting her. Anna mentioned the refrigerator incident to me often, always as a joke, and I was unsettled every time. But I did nothing, because I am often wrong, and anyway it was none of my business.
More time passed. Anna’s reliability issues and meanness faded away with time. She had multiple mental health problems, which she discussed freely, casually, almost jokingly. We were not friends, not exactly – the small group of friends to which I guess I belong made a few vague social overtures to her over the years that she casually batted away – but we were… I guess “colleagues?” We worked very well together, and often. But always there were weird things. Strange vague Facebook posts about loneliness or anxiety. References, sometimes forced, to the weird refrigerator moment. Distant expressions.
And I thought about reaching out. I’ve had issues with mental illness most of my life, and I know there have been times I would have been thrilled to have someone to talk to who wasn’t a family member or a close friend, someone I could unload on without burdening them. I half wrote a bunch of e-mails, a bunch of Facebook messages. I thought about it, time and again. But I never did it. I was worried that I was wrong, that she was fine and I had misread everything, and we’d both be embarrassed. I was worried she’d interpret my reaching out as patronizing her or hitting on her. We were not friends, not exactly, so it was none of my business.
Last month, Anna played a supporting role in a show that I directed that I had hoped to direct for two decades. She was better even than usual, which I did tell her. We discussed working together on a couple of other projects that we had both been anticipating. The show ended, we said goodbye casually.
And on Friday night, Anna took her own life.
I’m at a loss. I was not her friend, or her family, and she has plenty of those and I know their pain dwarfs mine to an almost hilarious extent. But now I have a guilt that I will carry until I die. Because I knew, damn it, I knew for fifteen years that this is where it was headed, and I did and said nothing. Because I was embarrassed, because I thought it wasn’t my place. And sure, probably nothing I could have said or done would have mattered anyway… but I could have tried. And I didn’t, and I hate it more than anything.
Reading this over, I realize that it sounds like I’m looking for sympathy or absolution, which I am not. I just… I guess I just needed to say I’m sorry. It doesn’t help, but there it is.
